The Historic Kubota Garden

 

When the hero confronts the unlikely villain, she gives him a choice—come quietly or the heroine, a woman he has come to love during their FBI investigation, will die. 

 

Now I, as the creator of this story, needed to make a decision. Where will the villain, a petite 48-year-old known as the “Doll Woman,” hide the tall, athletic hero? 

 

You’ll have to read The Cryptographer’s Dilemma to find out what happens. But I am going to tell you where it happens.

Velvalee Dickinson

The Doll Woman, whose name is Velvalee Dickinson, was arrested by the FBI for her espionage activities on behalf of the Japanese during World War II. I’ve written a couple of recent posts about her: The Doll Woman ~ A World War II Traitor and World War II's "Number One Woman Spy.”

Velvalee seems to have had two passions: 1) her reputation as an expert on dolls which she both collected and sold from her shop on Madison Avenue in New York City, and 2) an obsession with Japanese culture dating back to her young adulthood in California.

 

The confrontation between our fictional hero, FBI agent Phillip Clayton, and Velvalee takes place outside Seattle’s train station. Knowing about Velvalee’s love for the Japanese, I was thrilled to find that an emigrant from Shikohu, Japan named Fujitaro Kubota had established a garden on five acres of Rainier Beach swampland he purchased in 1927. 

Kubota Garden Gate

In the next three years, he added twenty-five more acres to his initial purchase. The Kubota Garden was more than a lovely place to spend an afternoon. The Japanese community in Seattle considered it to be a cultural center. Fujitaro Kubota’s home, office, and nursery were also located on the grounds.

 

Fujitaro Kubota Trimming a Pine

Sadly, the Kubota family, like many other Japanese, were interned during the war. They were assigned to live at Camp Minidoka in Idaho. During this time, Fujitaro helped to build a community park and a Japanese rock garden in the camp.

After the war, the Kubota family returned to Seattle. Fujitaro’s two sons, Tak and Tom, helped their father rebuild the neglected gardens and nursery business. 

In 1972, Fujitaro was awarded the Fifth Class Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government “for his achievements in his adopted country, for introducing and building respect for Japanese Gardening in this area” (Wikipedia). He died in 1973, but his legacy lives on in his historic garden.

 

The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board declared the original acreage as a City of Seattle historical landmark in 1981 then purchased the entire garden from the Kubota family in 1987. 

Two years later, in 1989, the Kubota Garden Foundation was established to preserve Fujitaro Kubota’s spirit and vision. Over the years, more acreage has been added.

According to a Kubota Garden Self-Guided Tour brochure printed by the Kubota Garden Foundation in July 2012, “Major features of the Kubota Garden include the Kubota Terrace, the Bamboo Grove, the Necklace of Ponds, the Mountainside, and the Tom Kubota Stroll Garden.”

Another feature is the beautiful Heart Bridge that crosses Mapes Creek.

Heart Bridge ~ Kubota Garden
 

The Stroll Garden was opened in the year 2000 and honors Fujitaro’s son, Tom.

 

We know that the real Velvalee Dickinson spent time in Seattle. With her love of Japanese culture, she no doubt was familiar with the Kubota Garden and perhaps even knew members of the Kubota family. The abandoned garden would be the perfect place for her to hide with her hostage.

 

A quick excerpt about the garden from The Cryptographer's Dilemma:

 

Velvalee's brooding anger sharpened with heartache as she and Phillip walked beneath the wooden entrance, which had been stripped of its iron gates. Though many of the gorgeous flowering shrubs and ornamental trees that had brought Velvalee such delight on past visits were thriving, vining weeds overran the border plants and rock gardens. Such a travesty and for no purpose….The water lilies in the narrow stream gathered against the bridge’s column, and thick algae bordered the bank. The odor of dead fish and rotting decay assaulted her nostrils.

…

“This place was a labor of love for a most distinguished gentleman named Fujitaro Kubota. He and his family lived here, worked here, entertained here.” Velvalee momentarily closed her eyes, letting herself return to happier days when she visited this garden refuge. “One could imagine herself in Japan while strolling these paths.”

“Why did you bring me here?” The impatience in Phillip’s tone caused her anger to flare. “Do you know where Fujitaro Kubota is now?...He’s in an internment camp. The man that created all this beauty, who gave us this generous gift, is now a prisoner. His only crime is his Japanese heritage.” She poked Phillip in the shoulder with the revolver. “That’s the government you work for.”

 

If I ever make it to Seattle, the Kubota Garden will top my list of must-see places. Though I used it for nefarious reasons in my novel, I also wanted to highlight, at least a little bit, the dream of a visionary. Perhaps you’ll put the Kubota Garden on your list of must-see Seattle places, too.

Johnnie Alexander imagines characters you'll want to meet and stories you won’t forget in multiple genres. A fan of classic movies, stacks of books, and road trips, she shares a life of quiet adventure with Griff, her happy-go-lucky collie, and Rugby, her raccoon-treeing papillon. 

Purchase The Cryptographer's Dilemma at http://bit.ly/ja-TCD.

Connect with Johnnie at johnnie-alexander.com.

Photo Credits:

• Kubota Garden Gate ~ Joe Mabel, GFDL granted by photographer
• Fujitaro Kubota Trimming a Pine ~ Public Domain
• Heart Bridge ~ BWorks, Creative Commons

 

America’s First Female Cryptanalyst

By Johnnie Alexander

 

A few weeks ago, I got a fun tweet from a gal whose Twitter name is MelissasLibraryLife. She was reading a pre-pub copy of The Cryptographer’s Dilemma and asked me this question:

 

“Only a few pages in and I wonder if it was based on Elizebeth Friedman’s doll collection case? Her collection is here at the #MarshallFoundationLibrary.”

My heroine’s backstory resembles that of many of the young women who were recruited by either the Navy or the Army to break codes. My main source for their stories was Code Girls: The True Story of the American Women Who Secretly Broke Codes in World War II by Liza Mundy.

These women often attended college on scholarships because their families were financially ruined during the Great Crash of 1929. They majored in such fields as astronomy, music, mathematics, and languages, and they often became teachers. As the young men went off to war, however, more job opportunities opened up for these talented and intelligent women.

 

I also read about Elizebeth Smith Friedman, first in Velvalee Dickinson: The “Doll Woman” Spy by Barbara Casey and in an until-then-unread book I found on my own WWII bookshelf, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone.

Melissa, who is the director of library and archives at the George C. Marshall Foundation, told me that Elizebeth and her husband had donated more than 800 photos, their personal papers and library, and even their desk to the Marshall Foundation located in Lexington, Virginia. She even “had the privilege of supplying information” for an episode of PBS’s American Experience called “The Codebreaker” (Season 33, Episode 1). I purchased the episode on Amazon Prime (only $4.99!) and highly recommend it. 

Elizebeth was the youngest of ten children born to John and Sopha Smith, Quakers who lived on an Indiana farm. She graduated from Hillsdale College (Michigan) in 1915. Though she majored in English literature, she also studied Latin, German, and Greek.

In a strange turn of events, Elizebeth was hired by George Fabyan, a wealthy textile merchant, to search for enciphered messages he believed were hidden in Shakespeare’s works. Though she never found these messages, her work led her to decode messages for the government during World War I, during Prohibition, and during World War II. 

 

After Velvalee’s arrest for sending coded messages to the Japanese, J. Edgar Hoover asked Elizebeth to review the letters to help the FBI build their case. Though she wasn’t the first to break Velvalee’s jargon code, she did perform [check this].

Unfortunately, Hoover made sure the FBI was credited with much of Elizebeth’s work—particularly for the codes she broke during WWII. Her contributions were mostly lost to history until documents from the era were eventually declassified.

This photo of Elizebeth and her husband, William, on their wedding day in May 1917. William was also a cryptographer with the U.S. Army. In the 1930s, he ran the Army's Signal Intelligence Service research division. [Photo Credit: George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, VA. (Thanks, Melissa!)]

Elizebeth died on October 31, 1980 at the age of 88. After her death, she received the following honors:

• The NSA inducted her into the NSA Hall of Honor in 1999.
• The NSA dedicated their OPS1 building as the William and Elizebeth Friedman Building in 2002.
• The U.S. Senate passed a resolution honoring Elizebeth's "life and legacy" in 2019.
• The U.S. Coast Guard named a Legend-Class National Security Cutter the USCGC Friedman in Elizebeth's honor in 2020.

Here are the links to my previous posts about "The Doll Woman" investigation:  

 

The Doll Woman ~ A World War II Traitor

 

World War II's "Number One Woman Spy”

 

FBI Field Offices ~ A Brief History of a Select Few

Johnnie Alexander imagines stories you won’t forget in multiple genres. A fan of classic movies, stacks of books, and road trips, she shares a life of quiet adventure with Griff, her happy-go-lucky collie, and Rugby, her raccoon-treeing papillon. 

Purchase The Cryptographer's Dilemma at http://bit.ly/ja-TCD.

Connect with Johnnie at johnnie-alexander.com.

World War II's "Number One Woman Spy”

By Johnnie Alexander

 

Velvalee Dickinson, a respected member of the national doll-collecting community in the early 1940s, had a secret. A skilled marketer, she carried on a regular correspondence with many of her clients throughout the United States, created brochures detailing the dolls she had for sale, and wrote articles for hobbyist magazines.

She also wrote letters to her contact in Argentina—a woman who probably didn’t exist—using a jargon code that provided information about U.S. ships damaged at Pearl Harbor to the Japanese. As I mentioned last month in my post titled The Doll Woman ~ A World War II Traitor, Velvalee forged the signatures of a few of her clients and even used their return addresses on the letters. Between February and August of 1942, the FBI received five of these letters.

The Bureau’s efforts to break the jargon code and their search for the traitor who’d written the letters had begun.

As a reminder, here’s a quick summary of the five letters.

In February 1942, wartime censors gave the FBI a suspicious letter supposedly written by Maud Bowman of Spokane. The letter, dated January 27, 1942, had a Seattle postmark.

· That same month, Mary Wallace of Springfield, Ohio, received an envelope with her address marked Return to Sender. Her signature had been forged on the letter. She gave the letter to her local post office director who forwarded it to the FBI.

· The FBI worked with post office censors to intercept three more letters in August 1942. Two of these were supposedly written by Sara Gellert of Portland and the third was supposedly written by Freda Maytag of Colorado Springs.

A top priority was to decode the letters. Unlike a substitution code, where a number or letter is substituted for the correct number or letter, a jargon code hides a message within a message. To the casual reader, these five letters had a gossipy tone and were about different kinds of dolls. But their hidden meanings provided important information to our enemy.

For example, the Wallace letter included these lines, transcribed here as originally written:

You wrote me that you had sent a letter to Mr. Shaw, well I want to see MR. SHAW he distroyed YOUR letter, you know he has been Ill. His car was damaged but is being repaired now. I saw a few of his family about. They all say Mr. Shaw will be back to work soon.

FBI codebreakers determined that the misspelling of the word destroyed followed by the capitalized YOUR were meant to bring attention to these two words: Destroyed + Your = Destroyer.

The USS Shaw, a Mahon-class destroyer commissioned in 1936, was in dry dock at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Three bombs hit the ship during the Japanese attack. Most of the crew were ashore, but twenty-four crewmen died.

According to an article on a website called Gangster, Inc.:

“Temporary repairs were made at Pearl Harbor during December 1941 and January 1942. Then, on February 9, Shaw steamed towards San Francisco, about two weeks before the Springfield letter was sent, where repairs were completed, including the installation of a new bow” [bolded emphasis added].

FBI agents interviewed the women who supposedly wrote the letters. That’s when they learned the letters had been forged. The common element was that each of the women collected dolls and corresponded with the owner of a doll shop on Madison Avenue in New York City.

Even though the FBI now suspected Velvalee Dickinson as the letter-writer, they spent more than a year gathering evidence. Their investigation led the agents to the founders of the Humpty Dumpty Doll Hospital in Redondo Beach, California. Velvalee had often sent them postcards during a trip she had taken along the West Coast.

This itinerary helped the agents retrace Velvalee’s journey. They found the typewriters that Velvalee had used to write four of the letters at the hotels where she had stayed. They later determined that the Springfield letter was typed on Velvalee’s personal typewriter, a portable Underwood #621465.

In January 1944, the FBI arrested Velvalee, the “War’s Number One Woman Spy,” while she was taking money out of her safety deposit box in a midtown Manhattan bank.

Special Agent E. E. Conroy is quoted as saying that Velvalee “fought bitterly, kicking, clawing, and screaming in an attempt to escape.” He also said that Velvalee had “sent many coded messages to South America containing military and naval information vital to our security and valuable to our enemies” (The Doll Woman by Barbara Casey, p. 79-80).

Faced with the evidence, Velvalee claimed her husband—by this time deceased—was the true traitor.

Though Velvalee was charged with espionage and faced the death penalty, she eventually pleaded guilty to censorship violations. She served seven years and changed her name to Catherine Dickinson.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a sister of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy, had taken an interest in Velvalee during her imprisonment and helped her get a job at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City. She later worked for Mrs. Shriver as a secretary. Velvalee died in California in 1980.

Velvalee’s traitorous letters and the FBI’s investigation inspired the plot of my newest novel, The Cryptographer’s Dilemma, the first in Barbour’s Heroines of WWII Series. The book releases in August.

Johnnie Alexander imagines stories you won’t forget in multiple genres. A fan of classic movies, stacks of books, and road trips, she shares a life of quiet adventure with Griff, her happy-go-lucky collie, and Rugby, her raccoon-treeing papillon.

Pre-Order The Cryptographer's Dilemma at http://bit.ly/ja-TCD.

Connect with Johnnie at johnnie-alexander.com.

Photo Credits: The image of the letter is from the FBI Archives. Other photos are in the public domain.

The Doll Woman ~ A World War II Traitor

By Johnnie Alexander

 

 

She owned a doll shop on Madison Avenue in New York City. She was obsessed with Japanese culture. And she is the first American woman to face the death penalty for her wartime betrayal.

 

According to who you asked, Velvalee Blucher Dickinson was either a respected businesswoman with a sense of style or a small, mousy woman with a mean streak.

Velvalee’s parents, Otto and Elizabeth Blucher, settled in Sacramento before her birth on October 12, 1893. She had a younger brother, Oswald. 

 

Elizabeth died of tuberculosis less than a year after Velvalee received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Leland Stanford Junior University. Otto died four years later when he was crushed beneath the wheel of a car.

 

Velvalee’s first two marriages ended in divorce. She later married Lee Dickinson, the owner of a produce commodity brokerage company that catered to Japanese clients in California’s Imperial Valley.

 

In the years prior to World War II, Velvalee cultivated deep relationships within the Japanese-American Society. Her dues were even paid by an attaché from the Japanese Consulate in San Francisco. She attended social events with Japanese Naval officer and other high-ranking government officials where she dressed in authentic Japanese attire. 

 

Even after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Velvalee’s sympathies were with the Japanese. When she was asked to find out the extent of damage to U.S. naval warships, she readily agreed. 

 

The Dickinsons had moved to New York City in the mid-1930s where Velvalee opened a shop selling a variety of dolls to clients throughout the United States and even internationally. 

 

She passed along traitorous information to our enemies by using jargon code in letters written to a fictional señora in Argentina. She forged the names of several of her clients on these letters.

 

Here’s a quick run-down of the five letters that prompted the FBI’s investigation into the Doll Woman:

 

·      In February 1942, wartime censors gave the FBI a suspicious letter supposedly written by Maud Bowman of Spokane. The letter, dated January 27, 1942, had a Seattle postmark.

·      That same month, Mary Wallace of Springfield, Ohio, received an envelope with her address marked Return to Sender. Her signature had been forged on the letter. She gave the letter to her local post office director who forwarded it to the FBI.

·      The FBI worked with post office censors to intercept three more letters in August 1942. Two of these were supposedly written by Sara Gellert of Portland and the third was supposedly written by Freda Maytag of Colorado Springs.

 

All the letters were addressed to Señora Ines Lopez de Molinali in Buenos Aires. But when FBI agents went to this address, the house had been abandoned. Months later, the FBI learned that the Japanese had switched agents in Buenos Aires without telling Velvalee.

The story of the Doll Woman inspired the plot of my newest novel, The Cryptographer’s Dilemma, the first in Barbour’s Heroines of WWII Series. The book releases in August.

 

Next month, I’ll share more about Velvalee Dickinson and the FBI’s investigation. 

The Doll Woman inspired the plot of my newest novel, The Cryptographer’s Dilemma, the first in Barbour’s Heroines of WWII Series. The book releases in August.

Johnnie Alexander imagines stories you won’t forget in multiple genres. A fan of classic movies, stacks of books, and road trips, she shares a life of quiet adventure with Griff, her happy-go-lucky collie, and Rugby, her raccoon-treeing papillon.

Pre-Order The Cryptographer's Dilemma at http://bit.ly/ja-TCD.

Connect with Johnnie at johnnie-alexander.com.

Photo Credits: Photos are in the public domain.